Ask around a little, and nobody, save perhaps for a handful of petty crooks, really misses the Bakersfield Greyhound bus station all that much.
Built in 1958, in the wake of the Bakersfield earthquakes that leveled much of the city’s downtown, the low-slung and theatrically nondescript concrete cinder block of a station was, for decades, a place where grifters, killers, drifters and some of the FBI’s most wanted were picked up and dropped off.
For most of its 60-year run, the Bakersfield Greyhound station was something of a living true crime novella.
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Greatest hits from the notorious station include the FBI’s takedown of bank robber Francisco J. Durante, after he was “recognized by several people as he sat waiting for a bus in the Bakersfield Greyhound station,” the Richmond Independent reported on Jun. 27, 1972.
Thomas Hawk via Flickr CC 2.0
The Bakersfield Greyhound was also the site of the apprehension of Frankie Tucker, a former Marine and cop who was wanted in Texas on suspicion of a sex crime involving a minor. Tucker was spotted in April 2008 at the station after having recently been featured on “America’s Most Wanted.” He was arrested less than a week before another “America’s Most Wanted” star, Malcolm Kysor, was also arrested in Bakersfield.
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And in the summer of 2018, a woman who became known as the “Greyhound bus stabber” boarded the bus and allegedly proceeded to terrorize two passengers. Teresa Madrigal, 48, got on the bus in Bakersfield and sat between Marcelia Vidal and her young daughter. Shortly into the ride, Madrigal allegedly pulled out a knife and threatened Vidal’s daughter with it. Vidal intervened and was stabbed multiple times in the abdomen.
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So it came as no surprise that the station — which was eventually relocated to the downtown Amtrak depot while the original building on 18th and F streets sat abandoned — was demolished in 2022 with little fanfare.
But the same can’t be said about the project that’s set to replace it.
A rendering of the Greyhound Flats housing redevelopment coming to downtown Bakersfield, Calif.
Photo courtesy Anna Smith/Sage Equities
Greyhound Flats is a high-end apartment complex from a known downtown redevelopment firm and the same architect who just revitalized the historic Woolworth’s building a couple of blocks away. It’s seen as a next step for the California metro’s surging downtown, as well as yet another — albeit much different — opportunity to both acknowledge and turn the page on downtown Bakersfield’s recent past.
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“The Greyhound station was a wonderfully brutalist structure,” architect Daniel Cater, whose Cater Design Group is helming the project’s design, told SFGATE Wednesday. “The decisions to remove the structure happened years before this team got involved.”
Cater, who grew up in Bakersfield, said he passes by the footprint of the bus station on the way to work every day, and though he recalls some of the not-so-glory days of the station, he also chooses to remember the site as the place where, as a kid, the bus would spirit him and his family away to LAX. It was a place that meant travel and a connection to the rest of the state, and it was a key component to the “modern architecture that represents the city post-earthquake that had to pull it together and keep going,” he said.
Architect Daniel Cater pictured outside his office in downtown Bakersfield, on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
He said it’s only been in recent years that Bakersfield has started to take inventory of and embrace those midcentury post-quake gems: buildings like the Kern County courthouse and the Beale Memorial Library, whose sleek facades and late-20th century charms had been previously lost to audiences.
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Now, those structures represent overlooked examples, recently recognized or revitalized in a downtown that is also finding its way.
Cater said he feels incorporating the station’s past — the good, the bad and the notorious — has always underscored the project: “To me, the physicality of downtown and the folklore of downtown — there’s no shortage of folklore or legend — inspired [us] to riff off of those ideas,” he explained.
The Greyhound Flats housing redevelopment, in the shadow of the famed Padre Hotel, is about to break ground in downtown Bakersfield, Calif.
Photo courtesy Anna Smith/Sage Equities
Renderings of the Greyhound Flats project, slated to break ground this summer, show a lot of that modernist architecture, down to the sign on the front of the building that says “Greyhound.” It is this effort to embrace, not shy away from, the town’s past.
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“The actual station, it did have a history,” Anna Smith, a Bakersfield Californian columnist and managing partner, along with her husband Austin, of Sage Equities, the development company leading the project, told SFGATE. “It was a large station, and people trailed through there. My grandparents and parents had fond memories as well, but in the last 30 years, it was in such disrepair — it was a homeless encampment … Definitely an eyesore, seen by local businesses around it as a place that either needed to be rethought or removed.”
Sage Equities partnered with the Mojibis, a prominent Bakersfield family whose patriarch, Majid Mojibi, “came to the U.S. in 1967 with $18 in his pocket,” KGET-TV wrote, and ended up owning his own business, San Joaquin Refining Company. In 2022, Mojibi was tragically struck by a driver and killed on F Street — ironically near the site of where the new project will be built.
A rendering of the Greyhound Flats housing redevelopment coming to dowontown Bakersfield, Calif.
Photo courtesy Anna Smith/Sage Equities
“The Mojibi family acquired it in 2020,” Smith continued, explaining how the Greyhound project came to be. “For decades, the city has been looking at what to do with the station. They … got to a point where they wanted to bring in a partner that has experience with housing. That’s where we connected.”
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“The Greyhound site is really my favorite project,” she continued. “It’s really inspired by the Mojibi family. They had a vision. They really care about what’s best for the community. Hopefully, they can inspire other families to think that way. I think it’s a way to give back and keep local money local.”
Both Sage Equities and Cater Design Group are celebrating their 10-year anniversaries, and their businesses have been intertwined from the onset. The pair have collaborated on previous projects, including one called the Cue Eastchester Flats and one called 918 at Eastchester — successful residential developments on the famously moribund east side of downtown.
Cars drive past the Padre Hotel in downtown Bakersfield just blocks from the site of the Greyhound bus station.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
Architect Cater said the firms’ early collaborations came with a heavy dose of outsider skepticism but, eventually, provided a toehold and a template to show that people really did want to live and work in downtown Bakersfield once more.
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“From an urban design standpoint, people living in a space are there 24 hours a day. They’re here when no one else is,” Cater explained. “They become the eyes on the street when everyone else is going to their respective neighborhoods. Housing is a huge piece of the puzzle to a vibrant community, and we’re on its way toward that.”
Austin Smith, Sage Equities’ other principal, said he’s looking forward to the project being completed in 16 months and opening in 2027.
The average unit size for a one-bedroom will be about 750 square feet, with rent starting around $2,000 a month, he said. For high-end, new housing, Smith pointed out that it’s “less than coastal markets” and not bad for a city that’s central to everything in the state that’s also on the upswing itself.
Smith said while Sage Equities won’t reveal the specifics of any one tenant, the demographic that tends to move into their housing developments — all Sage Equities downtown infill projects are rentals — comprises young professionals who are relocating from a slightly bigger or more expensive metro for a job and not only discovering for themselves what Bakersfield has to offer but, eventually, figuring out what they can bring to it.
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Building a place of permanence out of a notorious transit hub was not lost on Cater and his team.
“Bakersfield is still one of those places where the reason people love to live here is not apparent at a 55 mph pass-through,” he said, noting that outsiders who move downtown immediately get a cheat code over their tract-dwelling counterparts. “When you see the San Francisco skyline, you say, ‘Oh, this is an exciting place to live.’ Bakersfield, on the other hand, is an insider club with the way things are and the way to live and what’s exciting. Downtown Bakersfield, for people who have no context to it, helps narrow that bridge.”
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